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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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My understanding of Confucianism was that it’s got a lot to do with the “mandate of heaven” answer to is/ought problems. Looking it up, I guess that predated Confucius by several centuries, and I might have confused it with other threads in Chinese philosophy.

 

[5:12] 子貢曰:夫子之文章、可得而聞也。 夫子之言性與天道、不可得而聞也。

Tsze-kung said, 'The Master's personal displays of his principles and ordinary descriptions of them may be heard. His discourses about man's nature, and the way of Heaven, cannot be heard.'

[6:20] 樊遲問知。子曰:務民之義、敬鬼神而遠之、可謂知矣。

Fan Ch'ih asked what constituted wisdom. The Master said, 'To give one's self earnestly to the duties due to men, and, while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom.'

[7:20] 子不語、怪、力、亂、神。

The subjects on which the Master did not talk, were - extraordinary things, feats of strength, disorder, and spiritual beings.

ーTranslations taken from the Legge translation of the Analects

While there is a religious Confucianism that expands on his approval of religious ritual and rites (he having lived in a period of widespread animist belief), Confucius himself was (and the Confucian classics more generally are) quite humanistic. Essentially all instruction and rhetoric is based on the physical; references to the supernatural are vague and nonspecific; and the few references to 天命 (usually translated in most contexts to Mandate of Heaven) in the Analects are moreso appeals to some sort of spiritual/natural/moral law (as you noted).

I suppose you could say it’s spiritual in that sense, but given the teachings are entirely preoccupied with human and not divine action, and the classics themselves are uninterested in discussing the supernatural beyond acknowledging the native animism and ancestor worship of the time, …I guess it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, but clucks like a chicken?